


On the Clock

by lizardking



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-10-24
Updated: 2013-12-15
Packaged: 2017-12-30 08:30:36
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,965
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1016396
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lizardking/pseuds/lizardking
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Anger is not the thing Agent Ward does with his personal time.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

The first two fingers of Scotch did nothing for him, so Ward has moved on to a third. Or maybe it’s his fourth, he is uncharacteristically unsure. He’s alone in the half-light of the living area, the grey of both of the wall and the marble strangely fitting, the hum of the bus a comforting, deadening lull.

The catalogue of his brain keeps bringing up Skye and all her colors—the ribbons of blonde in her hair that look like spun gold whenever the light comes in through the window just so, the purple tank tops she fucking knows leaves all that olive skin exposed, even the warm tone of her voice when she’s teasing him, purposefully goading him into, well, this situation that has him seething on a cheap barstool instead of sleeping or playing Battleship or—

He stops himself. He's spent the whole stupid day trying to convince himself that the churning feeling in his gut is a professional and extremely appropriate reaction to Skye going rogue, though he suspects that everyone, including the object is his ire, saw right through him. He's not used to feeling so transparent, so wrong. Fighting is the job. It’s just life and life goes like this: discover the enemy, work up some mild indignance over the fact that said enemy would dare turn a delicious piece of toast into a minion of evil, or whatever, and then make the enemy go boom. He hates regrets. He harbors none. Anger is not the thing he does with his personal time, not when he's off the clock, drinking the community booze.

As it happens, Agent Coulson keeps a much better bottle locked up in his office, the prescient jerk. Ward usually doesn't mind the mid-grade stuff because he’s only having a taste, a sip to celebrate a job well done. And okay, yes, he knows the barstool probably cost more than the couch he bought for the apartment he has never lived in.

Experimentally, Ward bangs his head against the bar.

“Ow,” he says. It’s mostly reflex.

When he looks up it’s by chance. The playful patch of light near the ceiling reminds him of a fairy in one of the children’s movies his sister watched (and he watched, too, from a safe distance away). The light moves a bit, and he knows, he doesn’t even need to turn around. He might be close to drunk, and his stomach might feel like it's shredding itself while falling down a bottomless pit, but he is still Agent Ward.

She invites herself to sit down, of course. Ward’s surreptitious glance tells him she’s wearing one of SHIELD’s signature monitoring wristlets, a shiny silver prison. Ward doesn’t know much about this long haired, brown eyed girl who wears a lot of flannel but he knows that she showers every morning even when they’re just going to sweat in the training room, and then she’ll shower again. He knows that she has no family except the family she made herself. Keystrokes and code.

“Custom dictates that this is the part where you offer to buy a girl a drink,” Skye says. Her voice is strained, like someone attempting to defuse a bomb after watching it done in the movies.

When Ward doesn’t move, she sighs and reaches over the bar. She’s wearing those idiotic pajama pants, the lavender ones with cows. She’d look like an innocent kid if Ward didn’t know better and also if he wasn’t actively noticing the fact that she wasn’t wearing a bra under her black tank top.

“I don’t know what to say to you,” she says.

“‘I’m sorry’ would be a start." If nothing else, Ward is determined to stick to the script.

“I’ve already said that. You know I’m sorry that people got hurt, that people died,” she says. “And I’m sorry I was wrong about M—my friend. I just don’t think that’s reason you’re still sitting here waiting for me."

"I wasn't waiting for you," Ward says. "I'm drinking. Alone." 

He scowls in her general direction, but she just keeps talking, like she always does.

"Unless you want me to keep doing that. Apologizing. Because I can," she says. "For days, probably, weeks and months. I could try a whole year but I'd probably get tired.”

Ward squeezes his hand around his glass, hard. He’s grateful, once again, the Coulson spared no expense outfitting S.H.I.E.L.D.’s sorry-you-died gift. The tumblers are adamantine glass. How they were cut is classified.

He stands up. “I wasn’t waiting for you.” It’s time to leave. Time for bed.

“Just because I didn’t grow up with people doesn’t mean I don’t get it. You’re mad at me.”

“I'm not mad. Everyone else is upset. You betrayed the team, Coulson, FitzSimmons. They trusted you.”

“Yes,” she says, steadily.

She takes a swig from the vodka bottle and starts pulling at her hair. Skye likes to have something to do with her hands.

“I betrayed you, I betrayed every hour you spent training me, I betrayed all the mornings you saved me the last almond croissant.” Skye braids haphazardly. “I betrayed the time we blew off drills and had sex in the bizarrely large coat closet where Fitz hides the computer exclusively for his _Power Rangers_ porn. The sex was my idea, by the way.”

Ward chokes on something. Air, maybe. "That never happened," he says, lamely.

“So what? You hoped it would.”

Enough. “You think I’m mad at you because you went and slept with that asshole? You gave away information that wasn’t yours to give and people died." Ward stands. “If I’m not mad about that, I’m just as much of a traitor as you are. You can’t betray me. I didn’t expect you to be anything more than you are.”

Unwittingly, he sways closer to her, a move that feels familiar because he has caught himself doing it sometimes when they’re out in the field or even just when they're being briefed. Too much, Ward realizes, he’s said too much. Her lips are red from her own constant abuse, biting and chewing and touching, a nervous tic. _I can’t help it_ , he remembers her telling him once. _It’s my one and only vice._

“What am I?” she asks.

“I don’t know.” And because that's probably the first honest thing he's said to her all night, he reaches for her. He tugs at the elastic holding her newly woven braid together, and just touching the scratchy-softness of her split ends sends such an emasculating surge of relief through him that his synapses momentarily stop firing and he almost forgets that there's a new mission. The orders free him from the exhausting task of hating her, beautiful, curious, bright, infuriating woman that she is. He can pretend to forgive her.

His hands frame her face, combing out what he can of the silky waves, and just when he is almost reached the end of his less-than-infinite patience, Skye kisses him first. Wet, open-mouthed. She tastes like the vodka and cinnamon gum.

Finally, he thinks. Finally, finally, finally. She makes a little sound into his mouth, like happiness, and he is so much taller that he just lifts her, digging his fingers against the back of her head as she wraps herself around him like a vine that’s been growing for years. Here is the new enemy. Right now, he is so tired and she feels so good, the warmest weight he’s ever had to bear. Eventually, though. Boom.


	2. On the Clock: First Things First

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Grant Ward receives orders and advice, in that order.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I wrote this little thing while stuck inside with no internet or power after an ice storm last weekend. Just a little scene that takes place prior to On the Clock.

_Hours earlier_

It is oddly cold in Agent Coulson's office, and stranger still that Ward notices. The temperature on the plane is always perfectly regulated, except for that time when Skye is blasted a huge chunk in the fuselage (and then saved Ward's life, just by doing something so mundane as reading a safety manual). Coulson looks like Coulson, but more tired around the eyes, and he has just said the most insane thing.

"I'm sorry, Sir," Ward says, gripping the unopened file. "But I don't understand." 

"I want you to forgive Skye," Coulson repeats, just a tad slower, as if Ward is as dumb as most uninformed and eventually regretful people think he looks. "Be her friend. Be her S.O. She needs to trust you."

The cold snakes up Ward's spine, getting a vise-grip around his heart. Maybe he is getting sick, he thinks. Maybe it's the flu.

"I can't," Ward says automatically. Skye gave away their secrets. She must pay, somehow, and it's going to start with the silent treatment and angry looks, and—

"You can pretend," Coulson says, interrupting Ward's cartwheeling thoughts. "Consider it an order. We put the bracelet on her, but it won't be enough."

"How—" Ward starts.

Coulson smiles, but it's unpleasant, and not at Ward.

"Agent Ward, this is the game we chose to play. Our only option is to keep choosing to play it." 

Coulson is right, if a little dramatic, Ward thinks. And if there's one thing Ward is good at, it's this. That's how he finds himself in the common room, drinking, brooding, waiting. When she inevitably turns up to see if he wants to come with her to Coulson's office, he takes pleasure in knowing that he hurts her by saying he's off the clock. She's as squirrelly as ever, and flees as fast as she can, but the quick inhale gave her away. She shouldn't be surprised, he tells himself. The first group of people who ever wanted her, she betrayed. 

"We're not, you know," May says, in that flat way of hers. Ward had almost forgotten she's been sitting next to him, matching him drink for drink. "The Rising Tide got her first. And stop talking to yourself. We can't afford for you to lose it." 

Ward contemplates his glass. 

"Whatever," he says finally. 

May snorts. 

"I'm going to give you some advice," She says.

"No thanks." 

She continues as if he hasn't even spoken. "You're not responsible for her. I understand that you feel like you are, and you have since you ripped the bag off her head and let her fake-interrogate you and you got all flirty and un-Ward-like. But you can drown it out. You can make it stop." 

"How's that working out for you?" Grant slurs a little, and regrets it immediately. May is dangerous, even drunk, which Ward isn't sure really happens, and those are the most words he's heard her string together in ages. Her control is even more masterful than his. But May just downs the rest of her vodka and drops the glass over the bar and into the sink. 

"Perfectly," she says. And disappears, silently, a shadow. Grant vaguely wonders if it's a good idea for her to go steer the bus right now, and then decides he'd feel safer with her three sheets to the wind than any other pilot anyyay. His brain drifts back to the file, the one currently locked up tight in his bunk. He has important work to do and he is always, always on. Skye knows that. She'll come back, because she's the loser in this scenario. The amateur trying to fool the professionals. Ward feels a wild wave of anger. How dare she think she could be anything else? 

But the answer is so apparent it's been both the easiest and most difficult thing for Grant to ignore. He'd like to say it was him, his training, but he knows it's not. He's helped, in the recent months, even out her chances against whatever big bad tries to do her in. But even without the benefit of experience—watching her, as her S.O. should, of course—he knows Skye has always fought her way up.


End file.
